Michael Chermside wrote:
Raymond writes:
That suggests that we need a variant of split() that has been customized for typical find/index use cases. Perhaps introduce a new pair of methods, partition() and rpartition()
+1
My only suggestion is that when you're about to make a truly inspired suggestion like this one, that you use a new subject header. It will make it easier for the Python-Dev summary authors and for the people who look back in 20 years to ask "That str.partition() function is really swiggy! It's everywhere now, but I wonder what language had it first and who came up with it?"
+1 This is very useful behaviour IMO. Have the precise return values of partition() been defined? Specifically, given: 'a'.split('b') we could get back: ('a', '', '') ('a', None, None) Similarly: 'ab'.split('b') could be either: ('a', 'b', '') ('a', 'b', None) IMO the most useful (and intuitive) behaviour is to return strings in all cases. My major issue is with the names - partition() doesn't sound right to me. split() of course sounds best, but it has additional stuff we don't necessarily want. However, I think we should aim to get the idea accepted first, then work out the best name. Tim Delaney